This research will investigate the way Mfantse elders in a Ghanaian fishing town settle litigation brought before them. A characteristic of decision-making typically reported by anthropologists is the necessity for choosing between alternatives on the basis of several considerations, valued on non-comparable dimensions. For instance, a Mfantse elder may take into account motivation for the alleged offenses, their relative gravity, and the sequence in which they were committed. In such situations decision-makers are expected to apply procedures to simplify their decisions. In this research, cases of litigation will be collected, then systematically altered to construct sets of hypothetical cases. These will be presented to litigation specialists for "settlement" in order to collect a corpus of systematically varying decisions. This should aid informants to locate points where decisions shift and to report hard-to-verbalize procedures for decision-making. Subsequent to the period for which funding is requested, statistical analysis of the cases will be undertaken to isolate regularities in the application of simplifying procedures. Finally, a model will be constructed which generates one elder's decisions. The model will be verified in later field research, by matching model settlements against the elder's settlements in previously unanalyzed cases. This research will contribute to the advance of ethnographic description, the development of decision models in anthropology, and the understanding of natural decision-making.